Consumer broadband satellite services are gaining traction in North America with the start up of star network services using Ka band satellites. While such first generation satellite systems may provide multi-gigabit per second (Gbps) per satellite overall capacity, the design of such systems inherently limits the number of customers that may be adequately served.
Geostationary satellites can have an effective view that covers a large portion of the earth's surface, such as the continental United States. The frequency spectrum allocated to the satellite communication system is limited, however, so system operators have developed spot beam systems to divide the coverage area into smaller portions that can reuse the allocated frequency spectrum. The spot beams are divided into ‘colors,’ where the signals in the different colors do not interfere with the signals of different color. Each area served by a color is separated spatially such that any interference is mitigated by distance. The colors generally are defined by a unique combination of frequency and polarization, although any number of techniques to make the signals orthogonal, such as time separation, orthogonal coding, etc. may be employed. For the purpose of this discussion, frequency/polarization color separation is used.
While existing designs have a number of capacity limitations, the demand for such broadband services continues to grow. The past few years have seen strong advances in communications and processing technology. This technology, in conjunction with selected innovative system and component design, may be harnessed to produce a novel satellite communications system to address this demand.